Sunday morning brought this little documentary gem of existential anxiety to my digital doorstep: The future of modern warfare: How technology is transforming conflict. Long gone are the days when a newspaper delivery, thrown from a footpath and having missed its mark might shatter our living room window, allowing us the superficially satisfying retort of […]
Science as a system of belief is no less prone to fallibility than any other but embraces this implicit doubt and uncertainty as a core strength. The procedural aggregation of a body of verifiable, ordered knowledge as scientific truth is the foundation of our Global civilisation. It is significant to acknowledge that the essential and […]
It’s true that evolution proceeds iteratively and adds layer upon layer of complex utility to bodies, brains and to the disembodied behavioural systems recorded in and as culture or language and technology. Notice, however, that there is a certain threshold of confirmation and communication complexity at which entire nations, civilisations find themselves reverting to baser […]
“That’s all any of us are: amateurs. We don’t live long enough to be anything else.” Charlie Chaplin Amateurs indeed, and yet – as with so many things – we perceive not only the implicit limitations of our minds (and lives, collectively – of cultures and civilisation) but also intuit the significant persistence of doubt, […]
Context: Scientist: Extent of DDT dumping in Pacific is ‘staggering’ As a species and (such as it is) a Global civilisation, we surf on the breaking waves of short term advantage while incessantly displacing cost and complexity into the future as “someone else’s problem”. In contexts such as this instance of toxic envenomation of an […]
We do not pilot this vehicle of civilisation anywhere near so much as it pilots us and it is as a relatively unremarkable consequence of human vanity that we remain on the whole almost entirely unable to perceive this.
I have spent most of my life somewhat lost between two worlds. On the one side, a world of social existence, historical contingency and the endlessly accelerating rat race of attempting to conform to a changing rule-set and framework of normative assumptions that changes much faster than anyone can ever safely (or sanely) adapt. On […]
Context: Is Physical Law an Alien Intelligence? It is a concept on the higher end of a modified Kardashev scale that sufficiently advanced technological intelligence may be indistinguishable from nature itself; effectively – a parallel of the conjecture (in the article linked above) that “life has moved so far on that it doesn’t just appear […]
There seems to be something of a plausible inevitability to depression and psychological suffering. Being that our minds have been sculpted by long-term evolutionary biases towards survivability in a probabilistically uncertain and materially dangerous world, there is something of a hard-coded orientation towards pessimism (or at the very least – pragmatism) within us all. Culture […]
Christmas Eve: a lonely walk around my neighbourhood where I captured these glorious sunflowers basking in the last rays of one of those long slow Summer’s afternoons that seem to sidestep evening and slide straight into night. It’s been a spectacularly difficult year for everyone and while I can’t see this changing at scale in […]
Context: The Future of Life Institute The endemic and omnipresent enlightened self-interest of human psychology is generally such that, while we may already and for the most part possess the technical and cognitive or linguistic and technological tools necessary to architect our own freedom and a shared, peaceful and sustainable future – we are so […]
The greatest irony of every instance of civilisation collapse has probably never been that it comes without warning or time to avert impending catastrophe, as even then when disaster looms it is never entirely unexpected or unforeseen by those bearing sufficient intellect to observe its impending arrival. It is much more likely that we will […]
Daedelus Kite 